


Portable Magic

by eurydice72



Category: Logan Lucky (2017)
Genre: Books, Gen, Hospitalization, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 21:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydice72/pseuds/eurydice72
Summary: While in the hospital, Clyde is reminded about the magic of books.





	Portable Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kereia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kereia/gifts).



Clyde stops taking the painkillers after the second week.

"You don't have to prove anything," the nurse says when she finds the pills still sitting in the little paper cup next to his bed. "Nobody here's going to judge you for needing them."

He likes her, but she's wrong. His judge resides in a darkened corner of his head, barely visible but always vocal. Most of the time, Clyde doesn't mind him. Listening has proven useful more than once over the years. Of course, it would've been nice if his judge had bothered moving in before Clyde got sent off to juvie, but better late than never. And right now, his judge calls him a big baby for wanting to numb the pain.

"How do you expect to get stronger if you let these doctors keep on coddlin' you?" the voice says.

So Clyde looks at the nurse, shakes his head, and tells her, "I'm fine without." Lucky for him, she doesn't argue.

Ha. Lucky for him. That's a good one. He'd laugh at his own joke if he wasn't worried they'd think he'd gone off the deep end.

But for all his decisiveness, that first night is hell. Worse than the actual explosion. Then, he kept slipping in and out, not to mention all the drugs they kept pumping into him to keep him from bleeding out. Now, he's wide awake, and the pain is right there, setting his arm on fire even in parts he doesn't have anymore.

He's a ball of sweat when morning comes around. He keeps thinking it should cool him off, but it doesn't, it makes his skin itch and his eyes burn and the hospital smell like a locker room. When he hears the nurses start moving around outside, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and almost falls flat on his face from dizziness. Grabbing onto the edge of the bed to keep himself upright is instinct. Too bad he forgets he only has the one hand to do it.

His knee bangs against the metal railing when he goes down. Clyde clenches his teeth, biting back any sound of weakness that might try to escape, but as good as the cold floor feels against his hot skin, he pushes upright before it wins.

The room spins. He can't move until it stops if he doesn't want to crash again.

When the door opens, he flinches.

"Someone's up early this morning!"

He doesn't recognize the chirpy voice. "Had to pee."

"Well, far be it for me to get in the way of a man on a mission. You do your business. I'll do mine."

Clyde keeps his gaze ducked as he stumbles for the bathroom. All he sees of this unknown nurse is her shoes, sturdy and scuffed white, and the hems of her pink scrubs. She's tiny. Chicken legs from the look of it. She couldn't have helped him even if he'd let her.

He takes his time, relieving himself, washing the salt from his face, scrubbing at his pits with the tiny hand towel. What he really wants is a shower, but that requires help he refuses to ask for. Some of the itchiness is gone, though. It's the best he can ask for.

The curtains are opened when he comes out, sunlight streaming in through the window to slice across the end of his bed. 

His made bed. In his absence, the nurse has stripped his sheets and replaced them.

Clyde edges closer. Touches the pillowcase. It's dry, too. No evidence of his bad night anywhere to be seen.

He crawls back under the blanket and stares at the ceiling. This will cost him.

When his breakfast arrives, he sits up before the nurse can offer. He was right about how small she is, but she's not young by any means. Not granny old, either, though. Somewhere in the middle, with strands of gray starting to peek through along the part of her brown hair. Her narrow mouth has smoker lines, but her cheeks boast the deep valleys that come from too much smiling. Like her face only has two extremes, one to pucker up to inhale, the other to laugh loud enough to be heard across state lines.

"I checked your schedule," she says as she rolls the tray in place over his lap. "You're set to see Dr. Harper this morning."

Clyde doesn't recognize the name, but that's not surprising. He's seen a lot of doctors since leaving Iraq.

"He's going to ask about your pain meds," she adds when he chooses to poke at his oatmeal rather than speak. "What're you going to tell him?"

Why should he tell him anything? "Don't he know I don't want 'em?"

"Yes."

"He can't make me take 'em, can he?"

"Not if you don't want to."

"So I don't see the problem."

She lets him take a bite in silence. "If you go in with a plan, it'll be easier."

Clyde frowns. "Why do I need a plan? I'm the patient."

"Because it's his job to help you learn how to cope now. What did you two talk about last week?"

Now he knows which one Harper is. The shrink. He kept trying to get Clyde to talk about the explosion.

"Not much."

"Well, you've given him a lot to discuss this time around. I just think you'll be better off if you go in prepared. Show you're serious about getting better."

He is serious. He gave up the drugs, didn't he? He doesn't want the crutch. He wants to be whole again. And here he thought doctors were supposed to be so smart.

When he doesn't respond, she smiles at him and pats his covered shin. She probably would've patted his arm if what he had left wasn't swaddled in bandages. Oddly enough, it doesn't bother Clyde. Maybe because she hasn't mentioned his sheets. It feels like she means it to be reassuring, not treating him like he's some idiot child. "I'm sure it'll go fine."

* * *

It doesn't.

Before Clyde can find a comfortable place in the chair for his butt, the doc starts in on why Clyde's turning down drugs. All the words he'd heard from the nurses come out of Harper's mouth, only faster and with that sideways tone like he just wants to be Clyde's friend when they both know that can never be. "It's too soon. You don't want to get distracted by the pain and forget about focusing on recovery. Nobody judges you."

That word again. His lips clamp tight when he hears it. Harper talks for almost ten minutes before he catches on that Clyde isn't talking back.

"I only want to help," he says. "But you have to want it, too. How about this? How about we talk about where you grew up instead?" He glances down at the file in his lap. "Virginia, isn't it?"

"West."

"Oh, that's right. I've never been. Is it as pretty as John Denver makes it sound?"

"I s'pose."

"What'd you do before you enlisted?"

"School."

"And?"

"Preschool." That's a lie. Only preschool he ever did was at Pappaw's on days both his parents worked. If he was lucky, he got dropped off in time for breakfast. Ever since Uncle Stickley's electrocution, the power only got turned on after one when he has in town for one of his sessions so Pappaw made bacon with a blowtorch instead. 

But after he got deployed, Clyde met a lot of guys who'd had very different upbringings than he had. For instance, not once had he ever found someone who knew how to dig a cistern without the health department cottoning onto it or scared their baby cousins with the story about the curse of Chief Cornstalk. So he started coloring his own experiences to better match theirs. Like preschool. It made being over there without family more bearable.

Harper tries for another forty minutes to get him to open up about it, but Clyde's not in the mood. His arm throbs, and his stomach is growling because the tuna melt they served for lunch was barely the size of a postage stamp. He'd about kill for a drink, but alcohol's off-limits in here. Funny how they pass out pills like they're candy, but think a shot or two of Jack Daniels is too dangerous.

Back in his room, he's about to take a nap when he realizes there's a book sitting on the tray next to his bed. Not just any book, he sees on closer inspection. It's his battered copy of "Skinwalkers," the one Jimmy got him before his second deployment. He hasn't picked it up in months, but seeing its curled cover, the pages darkened from where he'd forgotten it in the sun, is too much to resist. He takes a seat near the window to read.

Except...it's not the same. He has to spread his fingers to brace the book open, and though the spine's cracked, turning the page with his thumb without dropping the book takes some getting used to. Like how he stares at each page longer, seeing words he hadn't paid much attention before, like the copyright and publisher information, a dedication that includes a doctor who gets thanked for his kindness, an author's note that apologizes for liberties he took.

He hesitates to get to the first chapter. It's almost like a different book in this light.

When the knock comes at his door, he's barely read twenty pages. He doesn't respond to his visitor. They come in regardless of what you say. But he glances up when the nurse from before enters, shifting his thumb to keep the book steady as he waits to see what she wants.

"Good story?" she asks.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I thought so. You've given that one a lotta love."

It dawns on him she was the one who must've gotten it out. That meant she'd gone rummaging through his pack. He might've been upset except she wouldn't have been the first. And at least he got his book out of the deal.

"You must like to read," she says.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Just mysteries?"

"I'm not picky."

She smiles. "You're saying, if I brought you in a book about a time-traveling werewolf who falls in love with a circus performer, you'd read that, too?"

"Why not?"

Something gleams in her eyes. For a second, she reminds him of Jimmy and the way he'd look right before he did something crazy. "Why not indeed?"

She comes in and takes his pulse, asks him a few of the same questions they do every other day. How's his pain. Is he tired. Does he want to talk to anyone. Half of them, he shakes his head as an answer. The other half get "Fine."

Before she walks out, he finally asks, "I never got your name."

The smile comes back. "Evangeline."

He gestures with the book. "Thank you, Evangeline."

"My pleasure."

* * *

He keeps the book under the blanket when the night nurse comes around. He knows this one. She's mean as a striped snake and likely to take it away as contraband or some fool nonsense like that. But the moment his door closes, he flicks the light by his bed back on and sets to reading.

It doesn't matter that he knows the story backwards and forwards. What matters is the getting lost. Learning how to read had been the best thing ever happened to him, then and now, because it showed him how he could get away from the world when it didn't make much sense. Nobody else in his family was a reader. They all thought he was crazy when he asked to go to the library. He didn't care, but when Jimmy started teasing him, too...well, he had to hide them after that. Places nobody ever looked. Behind the toilet. Under the bottom stair in the cellar. Tucked into the old copper pipes that marked the back of Pappaw's property.

Schoolbooks weren't the same. He wasn't interested in facts. He craved the other worlds, all these impossible places where people had different problems and good guys always won. He still learned things in them, but the knowledge was hodgepodge, nothing that would get him out of West Virginia.

Only enlisting had done that.

He'd needed the escapes even more over in Iraq.

But reading that night keeps his mind off the pain. He drifts off sometime after three, his wrist sore from trying to balance the book and keep turning the pages without losing his place, and dreams about being a cop for people who believed in the fantastic.

Evangeline wakes him up.

"You look better this morning," she says. She picks up the paperback from where it fell during the night and sets it aside. "Ready for breakfast?"

Clyde grunts and sits up, rubbing at the crusty corners of his eyes. The tray slides into place in front of him, but it holds more than oatmeal and apple juice. Next to his spoon is a hardcover edition of the collected works of Dashiell Hammett, the familiar Dewey Decimal numbers visible on the spine.

"You can lay that one flat while you read," she explains. "I don't see any reason both your arms should hurt, do you?"

She's right. Clyde props it on his lap when he sits by the window, his reading miles faster now that he doesn't have to struggle with the pages. In bed, he pulls the tray over, and then, when the night nurse turns off his light, he rests it on his bent knees for a quick getaway in case someone walks in.

The next day, she brings a new book. And a new one after that. Always hardcover. Never the same kind.

When she starts asking questions about what he reads, he answers without thinking. She even has opinions that make him think she might have read the books first. But he likes that she's interested and that she doesn't think it's weird that he likes to read so much. Enough that he starts talking to her about other stuff, too. Stuff he's never even bothered to tell Harper.

"You can't be serious," she says when he tells her about Uncle Stickley.

"I swear it's true."

"Maybe you misunderstood. Didn't you say you were pretty young?"

"I looked it up later." Because at one point, he'd thought he'd misunderstood, too.

She shakes her head. "I don't believe in curses."

"How else you explain Logan luck?"

"Bad stuff happens to everybody."

"Not like us."

She still doesn't believe him, but Clyde doesn't care. She doesn't laugh at him. That's what matters.

* * *

He doesn't get to see her every day. She gets three days off a week from the VA hospital, time to take care of her own life and not those in her charge. He finishes the books before she gets back, in spite of the new appointments in his day.

A prosthetic arm. Not what he was expecting.

It's ugly and awkward, and it feels like no matter what he does, it never seems to fit properly. Yet, he loves it. It feels right. Best of all, it makes him feel like he can be useful again. He'd be a liar if he didn't admit to wondering what he'd do without a hand.

Though it rubs his stump sore, he wears it as much as he can tolerate. It can't do much. It doesn't flex. But the nurses fuss over him like he's just given birth. Even the battleaxe on the graveyard shift gives him a thumbs up when she sees it resting on the tray.

Evangeline practically gushes.

"You're going to be beating the girls off with that thing when you get outta here," she says.

Jimmy's the ladies' man, but Clyde's never done too bad when it comes to the fairer sex. For some reason, though, Evangeline makes him blush. It's gotta be the way she sees him, really sees him, that makes him wonder if maybe there might be more for him than the casual hook-ups he's had until now.

The feeling only lasts while she's around. When it's just him and the all-knowing judge inside his head, the doubts creep back.

Reading is his only escape. Both from the doubts and the judge.

* * *

He stays at the VA for six weeks. On the day he's set to fly home, Evangeline walks into his room wearing jeans and a faded Garth Brooks T-shirt.

"Someone need a ride to the airport?"

He hoists his pack onto his shoulder. "You don't have to do that."

"Who said anything about have to? Now come on. The meter's running."

Evangeline drives an Escort that he has to practically fold himself in half to get into. She chatters the whole way, but when she pulls up in front of Departures, she stops him from getting out with a light touch to his prosthetic hand.

"Not yet." When he pauses, she reaches farther and pops the glovebox to take out a small bag. "Here," she says, holding it out. "I got you a going away present."

His eye prickle at the sudden sentiment. "You shouldn't've."

"Of course, I should. I'm losing my favorite patient. I gotta give you something to remember me by, don't I?"

He will remember her regardless of what the bag holds, and yet, when he tips out a box onto his palm and opens it to reveal the horseshoe ring, he has to stare at his hands so she can't see what the gift does to him.

"It's to protect you from your bad Logan luck," she says. "Horseshoes are good for that."

"I thought you didn't believe in that."

"I don't. But you do."

And that was enough for her to want him to feel protected. His mouth tightens as he fights to keep the emotions at bay.

"Thanks." He wants to put the ring on, but he can't do that with only one hand. When he tries to pocket it, she stops him.

"Let me."

He does. The ring's a little snug, but he can fix that later.

"Do me a favor when you get home, will you?" she asks.

"Sure."

"Stop hiding your books."

Clyde finally manages to sneak her a glance. "Why?"

"Because you're a grown man, and if someone doesn't want to accept you for what you are..." She smiles. "Fuck 'em."

She's never sworn in front of him before. He can't help but grin.

Even his little voice shuts up. Because right then, there's nothing it can say that wouldn’t be a big fat lie.

They both know Evangeline is right.


End file.
